Team Effectiveness: Assessment of Team Performance and Learning

• Assessment of individual members as well as assessment of the overall team are essential to enhancing teamwork
• Assessing teams improves goal attainment, enriches relationships, and enhances performance
• Both team performance and team learning should be assessed
  • Performance assessments measure success, help correct behaviors, and motivate performance improvements
  • Learning assessments enable team members to share thoughts and increase control of their learning
• Biases may prevent some team members from providing accurate assessments

• Self-evaluations, self-monitoring, and self-regulation enable individuals to identify areas where they can improve their contributions to the team
• Peer evaluations allow team members to assess each others’ strengths and weakness and collectively discuss how team performance can be improved

Note: If standards are not objective and confidential, team members may have challenges evaluating each other

• In successful teams members learn from each others’ thought processes
• Learning assessments enables identification of effective (or not effective) individual and group learning strategies
• Critical analysis of team members’ work enables team members to increase control of their learning
• Strategies for assessing learning:
  • Identify learning strategies and processes in relation to team goals
  • Use questions to determine what the team members were able to do easily versus with difficulty
  • Identify strategies needed to close learning gaps
  • Use self-assessments to encouraging each team member to take responsibility of their learning
  • Learn from assessments to improve future achievements

• Improves goal attainment
  • Strengthens commitment to common goals and priorities
  • Helps team members scrutinize objectives to identify misunderstandings or thinking gaps
  • Encourages leveraging of team members’ differences to accomplish goals
• Enriches relationships
  • Improves team’s cohesiveness and morale
  • Enhances communication among team members
  • Increases role clarity and utilization of team member’s strengths
  • Reduce performance barriers and conflicts
• Enhances team performance
  • Streamlines team processes
  • Increases team members’ confidence
  • Improves quality of learning output 

• Successful teams measure accomplishments, identify issues, and correct internal problems
• Performance assessments ensure equitable contributions and identify areas for individual/ collective improvements
• Strategies for assessing performance:
  • Generate clear and understandable team goals
  • Identify examples of quality work and successful standards
  • Use team discussion and reflection to compare team performance to goals
  • Identify strategies needed to close  performance gaps

• Team members may provide positive ratings to other team members due to empathy or fear conflict (Inflation bias)
• Team members may feel obligated to return positive assessments because they received positive ratings (Reciprocity bias)
• Successful teams may attribute their success to all members of the team (Halo effect)
• Unsuccessful team may attribute their failure to selective members of the team (Scapegoating)

• Cestone, C. M., Levine, R. E., & Lane, D. R. (2008). Peer assessment and evaluation in team‐based learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2008(116), 69-78. doi:10.1002/tl.334
• Levi, D. (2017). Group dynamics for teams. Los Angeles, Calif. u.a.: SAGE pp.309-325.

Teamwork and Team Leadership Table of Contents